My ex-boyfriend spoke Latvian, but I never learned more than a few words. One of these was "vecmamas šķiņķis", which was the name he came up with for a preparation of ham he learned from his mother-in-law. Something tells me šķiņķis must figure in a number of Latvian tongue-twisters. It sure makes a good shibboleth!

Aigars wrote:Okay.. Do you speak all those languages you're mentioning in your signature..?

With widely varying degrees of competency, yes. They're basically the languages in which I will attempt a response if you write to me in them.

But this is taking us afield from the subject of the thread. My Latvian-speaking friend had the pet theory that the Latvians were descended from Finnic peoples who adopted a Baltic language, which explains why the pronunciation and morphology is so much simpler when compared to Lithuanian (which, he joked, sounded like "Old High Latvian" to Latvians).

.. I've never examined Finnish any closer so I couldn't tell.. But I see though many small similarities between Latvian and German.. It is also said by some that the Latvian language is invented by German monks some hundreds of years ago.. There is a certain amount of truth in that theory, however there are many similarities between Baltic languages and sanskrit, or even the assumed proto-indoeuropean language..